NFO says :
""to run this you need to have access to a php-server (...) you'll need to install it yourself ""
Arg! and to see EXE demos i need to compile myself ASM or C++ source code ? sorry, no thanx ....

zone: you don't get a .exe from this, you get a .php page that is displayed through a webbrowser. to avoid overload on the webserver i decided not to put it online - but instead share the needed files.

fractal: i just found that gd-lib was installed at the uni i attend - so i tested the code there. i suppose that gd-lib is something for linux which php/apache has somekind of interface for.

I think i'll judge this prod by the screenshot (not feeling to hack right now, and i'm a nice guy anyway... >:)
Well, rotating cubes easy. doing it in PHP tho is an interesting idea. Javascript anyone?

poi: yeah, definitely, but there's a catch or two. With GD you have the tools needed to do software rendering to some extent, plus it supports alpha blending and a bit more already (I guess this demo just plots the vertices and asks GD to draw the lines). But...

Sound has to run on the client, so you either get none, or you have to figure out synchronising everything. With all the different browser implementations. Urgh.

There's no really good way of getting the demo from the server to the browser (everything so far uses constant browser refreshes to fetch the next frame i think - I looked into pushing out an anim-gif from GD ages back but it was either impossible or too much work..)

The next problem is that you have to run the demo on a server. You either have to put it on your own and let people connect, or you hand out the source and tell the viewers to set up their own web server + php just to watch it.. If it's on your own server, you have one instance of the demo running for each viewer, which means sloooow when many people connect, plus it heavily limits the complexity of the code unless you have some huge server farm or limit it to just a few viewers at a time.

What could work: loop the demo, and have just one instance running on the server. Then allow viewers to connect to that. Or perhaps a combined js/php demo, where the server has a few processes each doing one effect, and the js demo connects to them when it wants them and does the rest of the demo itself.

macaw: cool, seems there's some more useful stuff now then. When I last considered it, it was pretty much just plain GD.

Dunno what exactly the point would be though.. if you're going to do an opengl demo, why bother doing it in php + streaming the output images to a client instead of just rendering to screen? Well, guess we never needed a point before :)

It's really just down to work/reward for me.. to do anything interesting with php would be a fair bit of work, and the rewards would be pretty small compared to a normal demo. I'd do something simple like this if I did anything at all I guess.

Meanwhile, I haven't got time to do much at all.. my half-finished intro tools are sitting around gathering dust :/